A supervisor once told me that when he started in the lab (many, many years ago) he was told to flame everything to ensure that his aseptic technique was upto scratch. During his first week he flamed his ethanol bottle......apparently is was quite spectacular......

The hand flaming reminds me of a new technician who started in my lab once. He thought you were supposed to have the UV light on while working in the hood... That was years ago. I hope his supervisor noticed pretty quickly, of I wonder what his hands look like now?

the 1st thing when attachment students came working under me, i'd told them never never on the UV when I was around. he can do so when he is alone, and when all my reagents and enzymes were in the refridgerator...

Geneweaver wrote:A supervisor once told me that when he started in the lab (many, many years ago) he was told to flame everything to ensure that his aseptic technique was upto scratch. During his first week he flamed his ethanol bottle......apparently is was quite spectacular......

this reminds me of an incident in my microbiology lab this week during which my lab partner dipped his plate spreader in ethanol, flamed it, then stuck it back in the beaker of ethanol, which I was standing next to, while still flaming. I am lucky to still have hair left.

ToxicMicrobe wrote: this reminds me of an incident in my microbiology lab this week during which my lab partner dipped his plate spreader in ethanol, flamed it, then stuck it back in the beaker of ethanol, which I was standing next to, while still flaming. I am lucky to still have hair left.

Something similar happened in a lab I was in years ago. Once the flames were kindled, the person panicked and dumped the contents into the lab bench sink, after which there were flames coming out of all the drains on that particular bench....

My mistake had nothing to do with flame. Back in the good old days, we had to prepare our own restriction enzyme buffers (the companies did not supply the buffers with their enzmes back then). There were only three buffers: low salt, medium salt and high salt buffers according to Maniatis et al. The high salt buffer had low concentration of Tris HCl, so after it was frozen and thawed, the pH of the buffer changed. And this gave a star effect of EcoRI. When my first graduate student showed me the picture of her first EcoRI digestion of plasmid DNA, I could tell her exactly the problem. She thought I was very smart.

Well, we, the supervisor, are not really smarter. We made the same mistake before. But we learnt from our experience.

Retired academic researcher. Mention of a specific product does not imply my endorsement of the product. No conflict of interest or guarantee to work on the advice given. Do as I say, not as I do. Not liable to the loss of your valuable samples.